Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Basics

Whether your are blogging or developing another type of website, the basics to SEO remain the same:

• Good, fresh content
• Optimized content
  • Meta <Title> Tag containing keyword
  • Meta <Description> Tag containing keyword
  • A reasonable density of the keyword you are targeting in your content
  • Proximity of keyword to beginning of content
  • Keyword appearing in H tags and alt tags (there is dispute over this in the SEO world)
• Quality links back to your site
  • Organic links
  • Directory links
  • Authority site links

The trick, of course, is doing all that optimization to make the search engines happy, and still having a site that looks and reads well to your human audience.

I’m not an expert at SEO, in fact I’m still a student. I’m taking an online class that came as a part of my purchase of a great software package called WebCEO. It’s fairly comprehensive and has really been great in helping me optimize my own business web site as well as some client sites. They have a FREE version, which is fully functioning; it just doesn’t have some of the advanced features that the professional version contains. Check it out when you get a chance! WebCEO

This barely scratches the surface of SEO. Entire articles can be written on just about each element I’ve mentioned, and we’ll get to that… all in good time.